Racing Across The Tabletops Of TTR: World Tour

The tabletop racing might be obscured within TTR: World Tour’s name – hint: it’s what TTR stands for – but just the sight of small toy cars racing around on tables and other surfaces will immediately invoke thoughts of the popular Micro Machines series. Though there’s a similar spirit behind the setting, this is something a little bit different, a little more like a kart racer. For one thing, you’re playing with a follow cam instead of with a top down view.

Though it’s coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, this is actually a follow up to what started as an iOS game that was actually called Table Top Racing. There’s a simplicity and general structure which comes from those roots, most obviously in how you can earn three stars for beating events with ever better positions, times and scores.

The single player takes you through three difficulty levels and classes, starting you off in modestly powered Cult Classic cars with striking similarities to a VW Beetle or a Mini, before progressing through Street Racer with Porsche and Mustang-alikes, before setting you loose on the faster Supercar class and its McHandful P16 and Fauxrari.

The handling’s simple and fun to pick up and play around with, loose and arcadey on the whole, but with cars having different enough handling that you might find you prefer one car’s speedy acceleration over another’s easier cornering and improved recovery from attacks.

However, none of the cars are upgraded when you start off, and sinking coins into them can do more than just unlocking and changing the paint job. Each has four stats to improve the speed and handling of the vehicle to various degrees, as well as the ability to stick on some new tyres that have special abilities, from something more combative like Boudicca spikes to shields, bling tyres that collect more money in game, and bouncy tyres that let you jump every so often.

Whatever special ability they imbue you with lives on the left shoulder button, while the right lets you unleash whatever items you pick up. You can expect to drop bombs and acid puddles behind you and fire rockets and homing missiles in front, but my personal favourite was the Frostbite attack, which is particularly cruel when you hit someone going round a corner with no barrier on the outside, sending them sliding helplessly into the abyss. The twist with these is that picking up a second item bubble will augment the powers of the first.

Getting those upgrades and mastering the power ups can be a pretty big deal when it comes to taking on the various events in the game. There’s races, hot laps, multi-lap time trials, drifts, pursuit, eliminations and more, but they all rely on you being as fast as possible and avoiding any of the incoming power ups as best you can. Shifting a fully levelled up car back down to its stock values saw a difference of a good 15 seconds and the loss of a star, in a pursuit event.

There’s a healthy 70 events spread across the three tiers of racing, with the five different locations to visit along the way. There’s the obvious ones, such as a breakfast table and a garage workbench with the associated detritus spilling into the track, but I particularly enjoyed the Yo Sushi! tracks, with their conveyor belts and small bowls and plates of food. Each location has four track variants so that, while they might look familiar, there’s bound to be some new twists and turns to master during later events.

They’re also packed full of secret paths and hidden coins that give you tens of thousands of credits to spend on unlockables. There’s plenty to learn and those shortcuts often need you to unlock them by using a power up to blow something out of the way to open up the gap to nip through.

I got something of a crash course in a couple of these routes playing against some of the developers in eight person multiplayer. I could follow people down some of the rabbit holes and I surprised myself with how well I did, even winning a couple of races. On the other hand, I think they were all quite busy taking each other out to notice me sneaking into the lead.

There’s no matchmaking, but rather a server browser and game hosting to let you tweak certain settings. Turning off special tyres or restricting the cars will help level the playing field for newcomers, for example. It’s just a shame that there’s no split screen multiplayer, which would have been a boon for the game when online player counts inevitably tail off.

My only other complaint would be a slight lack of visual feedback in some places. Very often I’d get hit by a missile from behind, but not see an exaggerated attack land, just find myself slowing down with fire coming from my bonnet.

That aside, TTR is a good bit of fun, with easy to pick up controls and a pleasant take on the tabletop and karting racers.